Category Archives: Code 911

A Kingston family was the apparent victim of false
reporting Saturday, according to Kitsap County Sheriff’s
reports.

Here’s what happened: Deputies got a hair-raising 911 call that
came from out of the area. The caller, posing as a Kingston
resident, claimed his father was “going crazy” and had shot his
sister. The caller claimed he was hiding in a bathroom.

That kind of call is going to get police officers to respond in
droves. And they did.

Police surrounded the home. A Suquamish police sergeant could
see a man standing in the backyard; the man was told to show his
hands and get on the ground. He complied. The man’s two sons were
also located there and instructed to come around to the front of
the house.

Police read the father his Miranda rights. He, of course, had no
idea what had happened, and noted he didn’t even have a
daughter.

Deputies checked the home and then un-cuffed the man.

It turns out that one of his sons had been playing games on the
Internet. He’d played with someone online who’d been kicked off a
gaming web site. The person decided to have the Kingston home
“swatted” — that is, to try to get the SWAT team to converge on
someone’s home.

Deputies’ investigation continues.

Scott Wilson, spokesman for the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office,
said there were many risks and costs associated with making such a
high priority response. There’s the responders driving to the scene
as quickly as possible; there’s multiple agencies converging on a
home — when their resources might be needed elsewhere.

The situation is also frightening to those involved. But Wilson
said sheriff’s deputies are left with no choice but to respond
“tactically” until they determine it’s a hoax.

“We were acting in good faith,” he said.

And should deputies confirm this was a case of false reporting,
the person responsible could be punished by up to a year in jail,
according
to Washington law.

If you need any more reasons to get a locking mailbox, this
lady’s purse should provide a plethora of them.

Here’s the scoop: The purse was left behind Feb. 5 by a woman
fleeing Walmart in Port Orchard. She’d been spotted stealing
computer software and when a store loss prevention employee
intercepted her, she made a bee-line for a car, according to Kitsap
County Sheriff’s reports.

She dropped the purse in her flight. In doing so, she helped
deputies solve a slew of crimes.

Here’s what was inside:

Twleve US Savings bonds worth almost $4,000 that had been
reported in a burglary earlier this year;

Some meth;

Jewelry from the aforementioned burglary, as well as receipts,
bills and documents from it;

Three residents’ Washington ID cards (none of which were
hers);

A Washington state Fraternal Order of Police card belonging to
an NCIS agent;

A Fed Ex package containing a man’s military service
record;

Someone else’s IRS W-2 form;

Check stock used to make checks, along with five checks from
five different accounts;

And finally, the likely tipoff to just how she got hold of all
this stuff in the first place: A notebook that had many addresses
of estate sales and, most notably, addresses of where to “check
mailboxes,” deputies said.

Mail theft, from what I can tell by reading police reports from
around the county, appears to be on the rise again. And they’re not
just taking mail, but packages left on front porches (For instance,
the package found in this purse likely falls in that category).

A sheriff’s deputy worked to return all of the personal items
found in her purse. And while she got away at Walmart, police
eventually found the suspect (through a tip). She was booked into
the Kitsap County jail early Wednesday, where she remains on
$40,000 bail.

This week, the Washington Association of Sheriff’s and
Police Chiefs (WASPC) released their annual report on crime in this
state. I’m working today to analyze the numbers and get
the thoughts about them from our local law enforcement leaders.

For the county, here’s the overall trends:

Violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, assault) in the county
fell about four percent, from 1,103 reported incidents to
1,060.

Property crime (theft, burglary, ect.) in the county, too, fell
almost five percent, from 6,465 incidents to 6,170.

I’ve posted the report below, so you can see for yourself. I’ll
be updating this entry throughout the rest of the day with tidbits
and stats on each of our communities.

In remarkably coincidental fashion, at the same time a suspect
ate a gram and a half of meth as Kitsap County Sheriff’s deputies
investigated a drug deal, Bremerton police were heading to a Sixth
Street cafe for a report of a man trying to steal things from their
bathroom.

The cops found him Friday night “sweating profusely,” with the
bathroom in a state of disarray. Police reported that he’d told
them he’d “smoked a twenty sack and swallowed a forty sack of
meth.” He began going into convulsions, officers said.

Darcy Himes, spokeswoman for Harrison Medical Center, said the
man was treated and released from the hospital early Saturday
morning.

It goes without saying that ingesting meth in any form is
risky and
dangerous. But eating it? Wikipedia says — and I’d take this
with a grain of salt — it’s
actually the safest way to ingest it. But from Kitsap’s oddly
timed examples here — requiring hospital trips — I’d say we have
some anecdotal evidence to refute that.

I got a call earlier this week from a gentleman in
Allyn, who was surprised we hadn’t seen that his neighbor was
nabbed for bank robbery.

And it wasn’t your typical heist: his neighbor, 81 years young,
was arrested for robbing a KeyBank in University Place April 22. It
was his second such robbery — he’d held up one other four decades
ago,
the News Tribune of Tacoma reported.

“He seemed like an upstanding guy,” the Allyn man said of his
neighbor.

The robber didn’t get too far, though. A Pierce County Sheriff’s
deputy pulled over his getaway car a short distance from the bank.
He was booked into the Pierce County jail.

The
17-year-old defendant had his sentencing hearing Dec. 11 in
Kitsap County Superior Court. Our stories had already pointed out
the time he’ll spend in juvenile prison — 25 to 32 months — but
here’s how that time works. It’s up to the juvenile prison’s
administrators to determine how much time within that range he’ll
spend there.

Restitution in the case — which could be in the $12 million
range — will be set at a future hearing.

” … The risk of a high-profile case such as Clemmons’s is that
it will bring a backlash leading to a wrong policy,” they wrote.
“That it will continue to discourage clemency, for instance, or
that it will somehow slow the momentum toward reform.”

Is it time to chance policy in criminal justice — particularly
in the way pardons and commutations are doled — in the wake of this
tragedy? What do you think?

Reporters Barney Burke and Allison Arthur
wrote Oct. 7 that the hunters, using muzzleloaders (an antique
style firearm) were on private property in Brinnon between Highway
101 and the Hood Canal, and had permission from the Washington
State Department of Fish and Wildlife to hunt elk.

But the officers thought the men were hunting illegally — and
took out their own guns in investigating. The hunters were
handcuffed two hours.

The misunderstanding was eventually cleared up, but left the
hunters “upset and angry,” the story says.

I spoke with Karl Gilje, chief of the Port Gamble S’Klallam
Tribe’s Department of Public Safety, this morning. He said that the
investigating officers in the case were under the tribe’s
department of natural resources, and not under his public safety
department. They do sometimes assist one another at times, Gilje
said, but not during the incident Oct. 3.

A full investigation is underway in the case by the state
department of fish and wildlife and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s
Office, according to the
Peninsula Daily News.

Taking the plunge off of Bremerton’s two spans across
Port Washington Narrows is well established as a dangerous,
life-threatening endeavor. But should you survive it, it
could also result in a trip to the
clink.

On Monday, an 18-year-old Bothel man was arrested by police for
jumping off the Manette Bridge. A 911 caller said he jumped from
the “lower part,” of the bridge closer to Manette, just before 5
p.m.

Police found him in a parked car nearby. He looked like the
suspected jumper, and, the ultimate evidence: He was “soaking wet,”
police said.

The man said he was not suicidal nor injured, just a “thrill
seeker,” who’d done similar jumps in Maui, Hawaii recently. Police
didn’t appreciate his thrill seeking, and took him to the Kitsap
County jail for a relatively unused Bremerton
Municipal Code known as “mischief on bridges.” They set his
bail at $5,000.

Mischief on bridges, it turns out, is a misdemeanor punishable
by up to 90 days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

“It makes sense from a public safety perspective, that we don’t
want thrill seekers jumping off our bridges,” said Bremerton
Assistant City Attorney Ken Bagwell, who could recall one other
case of such mischief. “It’s not safe.”

Mary Heacock and her family have enjoyed the benefits of
thickly-built walls in their Hood Canal Drive home for the past
decade in the form of lower heating and cooling costs.

On early Friday morning, however, they learned a different
benefit of such walls.

An errant vehicle took a turn down their driveway, near the
road’s intersection with NE Cliffside Road, around 3:45 a.m. and
struck the side of their home.

The car, as evidenced by the Heacock’s security video, didn’t
penetrate its walls. In fact, it more or less bounced off the
house.

“We never thought we’d have to fend off invading cars,” Heacock
said.

The Heacock’s home was built with Quad-Lock walls consisting of two
inches of foam on each side of a hearty foot of concrete. Heacock
said that while they saw lights outside and “the whole
neighborhood” heard the car, they didn’t feel it inside.

A 24-year-old man driving the home was taken to Harrison Medical
Center with unknown injuries, according to North Kitsap Fire and
Rescue. No one else was injured.

The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the crash,
but details weren’t made available Friday afternoon.

Heacock speculates that with traditional walls, the car might
have gone through the home and even hit a neighbor’s residence.

“Had this been stick construction, we absolutely would have lost
our house today,” she said.